


These Resilient Stones

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Gen, Reference to Syria, References to London Riots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-13
Updated: 2012-08-13
Packaged: 2017-11-12 01:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What people don't always realise is that a city doesn't have to die for it to hurt.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Resilient Stones

**Author's Note:**

> Narrator is either Matthew Swift in one of his bleaker moments or a similiar appropriately jaded London sorcerer.

What people don't always realise is that a city doesn't have to die for it to hurt.

The Death of Cities is a callous bastard, but at least he gets the job done. There's something to be said for the idea that if nothing else, the pain stops.

I've heard stories about Calcutta – what it felt like to have that darkness eating away at you. If you were from there, you were bloody terrifying, capable of anything and more than willing to try it; if you weren't, you stayed away, because the magic there got inside your head and would never ever let you be. There was a madness about the place, and the thing about madness is, it's contagious.

Cities can scream and cry and tear themselves apart. Magic is life, life is magic, and life isn't always what you want it to be.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki went in a blink of an eye. But after Chernobyl, cities around the world writhed in pain and fear. That place was a sickness and it spread. Sickness tends to do that.

St Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and back again, revolution and starvation and terror. Never knowing what you were, only that what you used to be was wrong.

Even London. My London. The first urban sorcerers dabbled their fingers in the city in the nineteenth century, and all I can think sometimes is how lucky they were that they missed the burning, all the burnings, and the Plague. They still got cholera, and the Blitz, when the city heaved and moaned, but at least it held itself together. It never died. Londoners aren't very good at going quietly into the night.

I'm a biased bastard – all sorcerers are – but I reckon London magic is best because it's the only kind with those Londoners who don't know how to give up. It's resilient and it's adaptable, like every pigeon in Trafalgar Square.

We haven't got the history like Damascus, but from what I see on TV before turning over, before the ideas have too much time to settle and mean something, we don't want to. The Blitz hurt enough, without the people tearing the place apart as well.

I travelled, yes, tried the different cities, but I never did spend much time in Africa, and definitely not in the Middle East. The magic's strange there. I'm a London sorcerer, and it's a culture, a world, a way of living I don't know. I'm like every Londoner who steps that far outside my door: I bluster, I shout, I carry my city around with me as if somehow that'll keep me safe. I can be on the other side of the world with no doubt as to where I belong.

I've had a few friends – or acquaintances, nobody believes I have friends, just 'friends', because the city stops me keeping up my nodding smiles and curses – people from Berlin. You can always tell a Berlin sorcerer. They have this look in their eyes. They steep themselves in the lifeblood of that city, and every bomb, every speech, every brick haunts them. They've been torn apart, until they're left feebly scratching at a wall where there should be nothing but straight road. Scratching at an itch until their fingers bleed, because nobody should be in two halves. Berlin, East and West, was a city in torment, turned against itself until it screamed.

It's better now. The thing about not dying is that sooner or later you have to heal. I had – or used to have – more than a few scars to prove that point. Only Berlin's like a lot of the cities at the eastern end of the continent: they survived, but they were never ever the same again.

When the riots came, I took to the streets, not knowing what I was looking for but only knowing that I wanted to smash and burn it. I lost control for a bit there. I came to with trainers I didn't need, the smell of oil on my hands, and the deep shame pervading my city. Shame and self-loathing in the wake of that overwhelming anger, wanting nothing more than to hide away from the world and pretend none of it ever happened.

Life. Life is stupid. Life is insane. Life _hurts_.

Being a sorcerer is all about seeing the inner beauty of your city. Staring into the cracks and steel until it dazzles you – at least, that's how it works in London. No idea how the people like me in Beijing or Johannesburg or Delhi do it. Don't really care. Only sometimes, you are left grasping for some kind of beauty, because any city is capable of the most awful things. They can sicken or they can kill. And you're left trying to see the beauty in burnt buildings.

You manage it. You do. But that doesn't stop it reaching your heart.

'Life is pain, princess.'

Magic is pain.

Because cities don't give a damn about you. That's not their job.

Sometimes cities hate themselves. And yeah, you pick up on that. More than that, you're right there with them, because _fuck_. Life and magic aren't easy. They fucking _hurt_. They twist themselves inside you until you can’t imagine a world, a you, without them, the lows as familiar as the highs. Swinging Sixties and the eighties’ riots. Britpop and the IRA. London’s alive. Being alive isn’t a happily ever after, because that’s just a fairytale, and not something you can take into yourself and let burn through all your days.

The only good thing?

They do fix themselves. Like I said, London: hardest place to kill I can think of. 'Blitz Spirit' and all that – the utter refusal to let any bastard keep them down. If London's going, it sure as hell ain't going easy.

So yeah. I hurt. A lot.

But I ain't dead yet.


End file.
